Behind-the-Scenes: How We Built the 2008 Dream Machine!

Behind-the-Scenes (Page Two)

Left: A perfect example of the "too many chefs in the kitchen" problem that plagues geeks and their friends. Gordon and Dave were just super-excited to get their respective sections of the Dream Machine up and running. When time's an issue, sometimes you just have to work like a pit crew on a rig.

Right: This is an artsy picture of the hard drive holders. There's no back story behind this one--just simple, easy-to-use hard drive holders We packed the Dream Machine full of five drives, and while we don't anticipate removing them anytime soon, it's nice to know that we could do so in mere seconds.

Left: If you look super-closely, you'll note the secret hard drives we promised we wouldn't reveal until two weeks from today. Just kidding. You can't see squat. Dave is holding over three terabytes of raw storage power in his oversized hands, however. Jealous?

Right: Gordon slides the first of the Dream Machine 2008's many PCI-based devices into place. We would end up swapping the configuration multiple times before we achieved the best aesthetic combination of two videocards and one soundcard. Luckily for us, the case fit our two giant ATI 4870x2 cards while still leaving a little bit of room for cable management.

Left: Gordon carefully slides the power supply into place. Given the tight fit between it and the location of the Dream Machine's coolant pump, we actually decided to use the mess of cables themselves to secure the pump into place. Once we slid the power supply all the way in, there was absolutely no way that pump was going to move, period. We'd normally recommend using some kind of adhesive or screws to attach the pump to the case.

Right: Speaking of cables, here's the rat's nest on the dream machine's right side. Gordon would eventually use a lot of tape and twist-ties to get this secured, but the formidable task only grew worse and worse as we continued to add, tweak, and connect various new electronics to the rig.

Left: We fired up the machine and, curse our luck, found a leak in the water cooling setup. Or rather, a leak found us. We immediately powered down the machine once we noticed the drip-drip-drip of coolant onto the rig's sensitive internal electronics. As is typical with custom PC building, Dave is starting to disassemble his hard work to troubleshoot the leaky problem.

Right: We were pretty sure we had the leak nailed down, but we wanted to triple-check that we had fixed the culprit. We came prepared with various paper towels and napkins to prevent any stray fluid from hitting the case's expensive internals this time around. "Be prepared" -- sage advice for the Boy Scouts, Scar the Lion, and water-cooling enthusiasts.

Left: As luck would have it, we fixed the first leak only to create a second. Gordon busted out the flashlight so Dave could get a closer look at the source of the dripping. A CPU waterblock was to blame this time. And given the closeness of the tube clamps to the base of the block, we had no choice but to remove that portion of the loop if we were to have any chance of sealing the leak.

Right: Gordon gives Dave a helping hand. While we don't recommend clamping your tubes too tightly to the nozzles of your water block, we know that it's difficult to tell exactly when your hose is properly fitted. We decided to push, and push, and push some more until we were confident that a tighter seal would be absolutely impossible. But our macho arm strength paid off. This was the last leak we would ever see on the Dream Machine 2008.

Left: With the rig up and running, the scope of what we had built finally began to come together. The blue LED fans attached to the radiator give the rig's internals a lovely blue glow. We still decided to install three blacklight cold-cathode tubes to accentuate the effect towards the rig's lower half. The difference of the lights is subtle, but we love having the clear fluid transitioning in and out of a glowing blue state. It looks neat even though you'll never see these differences unless you actually pop open the case's side door. We're sticklers for detail.

Right: Gordon seals the right side of the Dream Machine 2008 with a loving embrace. Unlike typical cases, the HP Blackbird 002 chassis comes with a number of screws for keeping the right side panel attached and in-place. This makes sense, as HP does a fantastic job with its own cable management. Unless something breaks--or unless you're chroming and customizing a case of your very own--you'd likely have no reason to pop open the cable-hiding side of your rig.

It's alot of fun to put out guesses about the hard drives for the build, but think about it. If the manufacturer has not yet disclosed the hard drives to us then chances are the names we are spitballing into the air aren't going to be correct. I mean, how can we guess that its a 1.5TB Seagate if we already know about it. If the names have not been disclosed then we already know we don't know. These are not supposed to be known to us yet so we can't possibly guess that it's a Velociraptor, 1.5 Seagate or any other HDD we know about simply because, we don't know about these HDD's yet. I'm sure we will all be surprised and find them to be something spectacular, but if the names haven't been released yet then clearly any name we throw at them for HDD's already on the market is wrong.

They are the Samsung 103uj's. You can tell if you zoom in. The question, though, is what will they use for their OS RAID array (assuming, of course, that these drives are going to be a RAID 5 array for the storage volume)?

I'm guessing solid states in RAID 0 or RAID 5, unless MaximumPC decided to remove the Velociraptors from the heatsink-like trays and RAIDed them in custom cooling trays (because of the whole not-standard placed connectors thing).

I am looking at this at 11:24 PM PST on Sunday, not 12:00 AM PST on Monday. Just to let you know.

Back on to the details... The case, to my belief, was the cause of the leaks, the tight space would proveinevitable for it to be leak free. As for those HDDs, I am not going to keep my 'bet' on the VelociRaptor,but am going to stick with WD as the manufactuer of those drives. I am 98.99% sure.

Anyway... great job on the machine, Maximum PC, it really did knock my socks off! Literally!